After the screening talk with Borjana Gaković and Madeleine Bernstorff
Widmung für ein Haus
Irena Vrkljan, Germany 1966, 5 Min. German OV
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin: “It is November 1966. In two years this house will no longer exist. The street will forget the history of this house.” Vrkljans last image, her last glance, is of a tree growing on a patch of wasteland. Born in 1930, the Yugoslavian film student produced this film in the first year the DFFB was founded; it speaks about traces, about the remnants left by war set against the background of her own war experiences as a teenager.
Za one koje ne mogu da govore
For Those Who Can Tell No Tales
Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia und Herzegovina 2013, 72 Min. OV with english subtitles
Australian performance artist Kym Vercoe's search for romantic, historical places in Bosnia leads her to Višegrad, to “The Bridge on the Drina", where she unsuspectingly finds herself in the midst of an ignorant, post-war society full of perpetrators; former rape camps serve as hotels and the violence of the recent past palpably permeates every pore of everyday life. Though she too is suspected, intimidated, interrogated, nothing can stop her from grieving. In a reckoning with the entrenched narrative of the well-known book by Nobel Prize winner for literature Ivo Andrić, Jasmila Žbanić creates a visible memorial to the women who were systematically subjected to sexual violence as a weapon of war, focussing on the sites of these crimes as places which bore witness. The footage of these places cannot be divided into fictional or documentary categories; rather, an overriding sense of horror makes both unmistakably real and tangible.